“Oh my god,” she said, picking up the phone that she’d lost, that she thought had been stolen, or thrown away. Her old phone, containing all of her numbers, her text message conversations, her passwords. Gregor had had it all along. Her whole life was on there, or her life before she met him, anyway. She turned it on, not expecting, after all this time, that the thing would have any power, but it chimed into life, the battery at seventy-five percent. Ruby was halted by the chilling knowledge that not only had he been keeping the phone, he’d been regularly charging it up. She saw that there were no unread notifications. Gregor had been reading them all. But why? In the calls menu, there were hundreds of missed calls, mostly from Marianne, but some from Joanna too. Her breath caught, and she felt sick with guilt and regret for ignoring them, for not contacting and telling them she’d changed numbers. Scrolling through, she saw that every Sunday, Marianne would start calling in the morning, then continue every hour or so until the early hours of Monday morning. Drink and dial—her specialty. She immediately stopped feeling guilty. If Ruby had answered any of those desperate calls, she would have spoken to a person still ruled by drink.

She switched the phone off again, pushing thoughts of Marianne and Joanna away. No time for that now. Also in the box was a black device almost the size and shape of a mobile phone, but unlike any make or model she’d seen before. She turned it over, found the “On” button, pressed it. The word TRAX flashed up in blue and disappeared before the screen filled with a map. It took a few seconds for her to realize what it was she was looking at.

“It’s a tracking device,” said Ruby.

Constance leaned over to look. She pointed at the flag icon in the center. “Is that the apartment?”

Sure enough, the map was recognizably of the local area, centered on the New Park estate, shown from above. The flag was in the North Block.

“Must be,” said Ruby. “I don’t get it, though. What’s it tracking? Itself? Is that like a ‘Home’ flag?”

“No,” said Constance. “Look, there’re two flags, but they’re really close together. There’ll be a locator device, a small thing. He told me once he had one for his car, in case it ever was stolen.”

Ruby ran to the window, panicking that he’d come back again. The space was still empty. “His car isn’t here, though.”

“Is the locator in the box?”

Ruby turned the box upside down. Nothing. She felt in the corners. “Not in here.”

“Maybe it’s faulty.”